Microsoft Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools to analyze data and share insights. With free Power BI desktop tool, you can easily create intuitive reports using a variety of data sources and publish them to your Power BI dashboard. You can then view your reports in the browser or the Power BI…

A customer recently asked me a question on C++ vs. C# in terms of developer populations while deciding whether or not to recode a C++ app using C#. One reason for the thought was that going forward it might be easier to find C# than C++ developers. As I set out to find a not…

Azure Service Fabric is a PaaS service with which developers can build always-on, scalable, distributed applications microservice based apps. To get started, follow the steps outlined in the articles below. Prepare your development environment Create your first Azure Service Fabric application I updated Service Fabric runtime SDK, and tools for Visual Studio 2015 on…

Deploying an Azure Container Service (ACS) cluster is fairly easy. You can use the Azure portal, PowerShell scripts or CLI command lines. You can find a good introduction to ACS at github. You can find step by step instructions below. Deploy an Azure Container Service cluster Connect to an Azure Container Service cluster Container management…

While Microsoft Azure offers an open and flexible platform for PaaS solutions, customers and partners usually take a “Lift and Shift” approach to moving their existing apps to Azure, that is, they try to keep and run the systems “as-is” or with minimal changes. The reason why they take the approach is rather obvious, whether…

I recently worked with the Cortana Intelligent Suite Ecosystem team to create a demo app called Contoso Health while preparing for a healthcare partner meeting. The motivation behind the demo app is to show how we can use Azure Machine Learning web services and Power BI in a “real” demo application, real in terms of…

Using Microsoft Azure App Service, you can create a cross-platform app (Android, Cordova, iOS, Windows, Xamarin code based Andriod or iOS) with Mobile Apps (web api service) and database in the backend very easily. You can find step by step instructions at the blog series under App Service Mobile Apps. One small issue is that…

As we outlined in the first blog post, single VM is a natural choice for solutions that can be packaged in a single server on Windows or Linux. In this post we provide the technical detail on how to create a single virtual machine that contains your solution. Two Azure Deployment Models Azure supports…

If you know Microsoft Azure, you probably have heard about the Azure Marketplace, which was launched last July at the World Partner Conference and is currently in preview. While you can find a good deal of information on the Azure Marketplace online, including the Azure Marketplace FAQ, you may still find yourself looking for…